Partial narratives that underpin policymaking prevent people in arid regions from fulfilling their potential to provide food and sustain resilient livelihoods in a changing climate.

This is among the conclusions of an international study whose partners today release a series of policy briefs that identify flaws in policy narratives in the Indian, Chinese, Kenyan and global contexts.

The publications come as drylands experts from around the world meet in Bonn, Germany for the second scientific conference of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification and the eleventh session of the Committee for the Review of the Implementation of the Convention (9-19 April).

"Policymakers often dismiss the world’s drylands as fragile ecosystems where highly variable, unpredictable and scattered rainfall is seen as fundamental constraint to food production that compels local people to over-farm or over-graze their land, thereby exacerbating scarcity and degradation, further reducing productivity and inducing desertification, conflict and migration," says Ced Hesse of the International Institute for Environment and Development. "But this ignores both the dynamics of dryland ecosystems and how dryland communities have long learnt how to live with and harness this variability to support sustainable and productive economies, societies and ecosystems."

"Narratives that underpin global policymaking on agricultural development are necessary simplifications," says Saverio Krätli, author of one of the new briefing papers: Global public policy narratives on the drylands and pastoralism. "However, such simplifications currently hide a fundamental alternative in the way of using unpredictably variable environments for food production: one in which people operate with variability rather than against it, adapt and turn variability into a valuable resource rather than resist and suffer it as a costly disturbance. We are learning this from pastoral systems developed to operate in highly variable environments. In times of globalised weather volatility this is no lesson to be missed".

In addition to the paper by Krätli, researchers in India, China and Kenya have published country-specific papers on the following topics.

Srijit Mishra of the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research says: "In India, the public policy response to address food and nutrition security has been to do more of the same. That is, to transfer to rainfed areas the input-intensive technological approaches of the Green Revolution. But these areas are home to diverse, highly integrated production systems that are better adaptable to climatic variability.

"A 'one-size fits all' policy response will not be viable," says Mishra. "Instead, we urgently need an alternative macro policy that focuses on location-specific, decentralised, integrated, and knowledge-centric approach that pro-actively exploits diversity and variability to sustain and enhance production."

Speaking about the situation in China, Wenjun Li, a professor at Peking University says: "People have developed systems of pastoralism with highly mobile livestock as a strategy to cope with variable environmental resources and climatic conditions. However, policymakers have misunderstood this. As more stakeholders begin to recognise that climate change is an important issue, we have an opportunity to reframe mainstream policy narratives that influence pastoral development policies in arid regions."

Notes to editors

The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) is an independent, non-profit research institute. Set up in 1971 and based in London, IIED provides expertise and leadership in researching and achieving sustainable development (see: www.iied.org).

IIED, in partnership with the University of Peking in China, the Revitalizing Rainfed Agriculture Network and Rainfed Livestock Network in India, and the Arid and Semi-Arid Lands Secretariat of the Ministry of State for Development of Northern Kenya and other Arid lands in Kenya, is implementing a one-year project entitled New perspectives on climate resilient drylands development (2012/13). Funded by the Ford Foundation, the project is researching the assumptions, arguments and evidence that underpin national and global narratives on the drylands in order to formulate more progressive perspectives based on scientific evidence and traditional local knowledge and experience. The views expressed in this briefing, however, do not necessarily reflect the position of the Ford Foundation.